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USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication
EagleHasLanded writes "The U.S. Metric Association has been advocating for metrication since 1916 – without much success. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. government passed the Metric Conversion Act, but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone. Or could U.S. educators and health & safety advocates put this issue back on Congress' radar screen?"
This is a myth. The only places where some 1 DM = 1 € conversions were attempted were bars and pubs.
No. Read the link. China has it's own units.
Every country has traditional units. China, like Europe, uses metric in almost all engineering, building, legislation. You might buy vegetables in a street market in traditional units, though that's fast fading, but in the supermarket all the packages are marked in litres and grams. The road signs are in km. Your weight is in kgs.Your height in cm.
It's an interesting article, but having been to China, people talk distances between locations in km, and the weights in the market are in grams. China is SI, even if China still officially recognizes ancient measures. Have you, in your Chinese travels, ever seen anything that wasn't measured in SI units?
Slashdot. The only site where Wikipedia trumps reality (at least the OP posted it tongue in cheek).
Learn to love Alaska
Decimal units were actually put into practice first in the US, thanks to Thomas Jefferson who was an ardent proponent of the idea.
He was successful in giving the US had the first decimal currency in the world, and later proposed decimalization of the units of measure.
"to reduce every branch to the same decimal ratio already established for the coin, and thus bring the calculation of the principal affairs of life within the arithmetic of every man who can multiply and divide plain numbers." -Thomas Jefferson
The French picked up the idea when Franklin and Jefferson promoted the idea while in France as ambassadors.
The problem was (like in many things) Congress didn't cotton to a good idea and failed to adopt it when Jefferson proposed it after the adoption of the Constitution.
Jefferson actually advocated the measures be based on the motion of a pendulum at 38 degrees, something that predated the definition of units in the metric system in physical units by almost 200 years.
Note to mods: He's talking about the square socket drive (from, e.g. the ratchet handle), not the size of the socket wrenches themselves.
Just curious, are there any metric drive standards in Europe, and why haven't they found their way to the US?
They're already here because they are the same. They are 6.35mm (1/4"), 9.5mm (3/8"), and 12.7mm (1/2").
There would be absolutely no upside to fragmentation in this standard (the only point of which is interchangeability). If you think the point of the metric system is to have everything in some integer measurement, then you're converting for the wrong reason.
Please read this, it explains it clearly:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html